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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

1. Stop using recruiters.

2. Network. The best jobs I've found have been through people I meet and recommendations of friends and other entrepreneurs. Bypass the entire system and everyone is happier.

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Unfortunately, I don't think for a company that is not a fresh startup it is possible not to use recruiters. Somebody has to screen resumes, organize the process, etc. And it takes a lot of time, but somebody has to do it. So recruiters do it. In order to make them do it well, there are incentives. As often happens, incentives are linked to something measurable - people called, people interviewed, people hired. Then Goodhart's law comes in and measured quantity starts to detach from the goal - hiring best people possible - and here we are.

I highly doubt that an ordinary recruiter will do a better job of screening resumes than a hiring manager / member of a hiring group. It is entirely possible for someone in your team to spend 1 hour a day screening resumes and you will have a decent short list of candidates by the end of 1 week.

For big companies, in-house recruiters do the same.

In any case, however you distribute it, it becomes a full-time job. You can part-time assign highly qualified coders (you don't hire any other, right?) to do it, which would only mean you'd have to reallocate their tasks, i.e. hire additional highly qualified coder, for example. Which would cost you, probably, way more than hiring a recruiter - and your highly qualified coders would be very unhappy to spend time on reading crappy resumes (and since they are unfiltered, there will be all kinds of crappy ones, outright liars, scammers and what not). And then you also need to get on the phone with people, arrange schedules, keep documentation and keep track of interview progress and results, etc. etc. It seems to me you seriously underestimate how much of a time sink it can be.

People invented separation of labor for a reason, you know. Recruiting can benefit from specialization too.

> 1. Stop using recruiters.

If that were possible that would be fantastic, but I've found more often than not, you are forced to go through a recruiter to meet the real company. If you ruled out jobs that aren't advertised directly by the employer, you would miss out on a large portion of opportunities.

For dev jobs, there will be a lot of opportunities left over -- and they will probably be saner, on average, than the ones you'll be missing.

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